Fixing What Isn’t Broken
The alarm on my phone works. It wakes me gently, mentally bringing me into a world of magic with the opening bars of “Hedwig’s Theme.” I bought the song years ago for this expressed purpose, and it has been bringing me out of sleep ever since.
But I decided that I needed a change. Why? I’m not sure. It was just an impulse that I needed a different alarm. I considered a few options—the music from “A Very English Scandal” wasn’t sold on the iTunes store.
“It Happens Every Day” by Dar Williams would be perfect except that it reminds me of miscarriage.
But I ultimately landed on the song that plays before and after movies at the Scottish Seabird Center. It’s happy, and it reminds me of a happy place. I reset my wake up alarm to play this theme and went to sleep, excited to start a new day infused with happiness.
But the moment it started playing in the morning, we jolted out of bed, our hearts pounding. Beyond having cold water thrown over your head, it may just be the worst thing to use for wake up purposes that I’ve ever encountered. I turned down the volume for the first snooze and jolted again when the hands started clapping. There is no volume where that song becomes a happy way to wake up. I know because I set multiple alarms with this music, so we had to endure it two more times that morning. Josh made me promise that I would change it immediately.
I’m currently back to “Hedwig’s Theme” for the time being. It works. But I’m thinking about buying this song from an old, favourite video game. It would be good… right?
6 comments
My husband recently turned the volume all the way down on my alarm (an old-fashioned clock radio!), so I slept right through it. Why? Because I accidentally set it to alarm (which does not actually have a volume adjustment; it’s blaring all the time) instead of music. Normally, I wake up a few minutes before my alarm…or at the sound of the electrical impulse that turns the radio on (it’s like a light click). But lately I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night and only dozing off again 30-45 minutes before my alarm, so I am not immediately awake enough to turn the alarm off before the radio starts playing. I’m sure I will hear about it later, as someone has gotten used to not having to hear my alarm when I get up.
I cannot advise you as to the best waking music, because I just go with whatever’s on the radio…loud commercial, song I like, song I hate, the weather, whatever.
Until I realized the child would wake up to Seth Meyers replays, I would play this for her to wake her up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs_WPpmo7bo
I guess I am out of touch, as it never occurred to me to download a special song for my morning alarm. I just use one of the standard iPhone alarms.
I still use a clock radio… but the radio reception/tuning mostly sucks, so we just use the alarm. It starts beeping softly and then gets louder and louder until you turn it off, lol. Dh does sometimes use the alarm on his phone as backup, especially if we’re getting up early to catch a plane or something like that — but we both generally turn our phones off at night before we go to sleep.
I (mostly) ditched the alarm during quarantine and made a choice to wake up when my body wants to wake up. Before then it was always a
blaring alarm clock beep to drag my butt out of bed. I like the idea of waking up to something more fun!
I use Carole King’s Beautiful.
“You’ve got to get up every morning,
with a smile on your face …”
I’m not a morning person, but I don’t complain when the alarm goes off – perhaps because of this.